


The Burden of a Life Well Lived

by Ghoststar



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Angst and Humor, Background Relationships, Family Reunions, Gen, Growing up apart, Illnesses, Memory Alteration, Memory Restoration, Minor Injuries, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Season/Series 02, Road Trips, Temporal Paradox, Time Travel Sickness, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 05:22:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29326959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghoststar/pseuds/Ghoststar
Summary: The Hargreeves did a whole lot of tampering in 1963. The effects catch up with them.-or: The Hargreeves grow up scattered across the world, in normal enough homes and normal enough lives, with no memory of who they were or where they've been. Well, everyone except for Five. Five wakes up, fifteen, and with the memories of two very different lives competing for space inside his head.
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s), Number Five | The Boy & Ben Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy) & Everyone, The Hargreeves Family
Comments: 4
Kudos: 44





	The Burden of a Life Well Lived

Five knows as soon as they land in 2019 that something has gone wrong. He can feel it like static under his skin, can taste it like a summer storm breaking open inside his skull. The smell of burning wafts hot and heavy into his nose as the suitcase handles goes incandescent in his hand. He drops it with a curse, kicking between Luther’s legs and across the parlor floor where it slides to a stop against the stairs.

“Move,” Five shouts and is the first to break the circle.

The six of them rush into the sitting room as quickly as they can, disoriented and weaving from the rough landing. Five ducks around the corner, tucking himself against the bookshelf just as the suitcase begins to rattle. The smell grows to stomach churning proportions. It’s a living thing, crawling out of the suitcase and stretching out across the house, sinking into their skin, into their lungs.

“Get down,” someone warns.

Luther snatches up Vanya and Klaus, tucking them close, even as Diego dives to the other side of the bar and Allison ducks behind a pillar. Five covers his head and the ticking of his mind slows as time falters all around them.

The suitcase stills its clattering and the locks click open-

The heatwave scorches everything in its path, searing through walls and clothes, stinging like sunburn, burning like radiation tearing through them. It passes by in only a second, but continues outwards, out of the Academy and into the street. It bathes the city in its glow, leaving behind popped lightbulbs and fried technology in everything more advanced than a rock.

There’s a pause, like the moment between an exhale and an inhale, and then the suitcase breaths in. It collapses in on itself, sucking all the air out of the room and into the vacant space it use to reside in. The table in the parlor is dragged across the floor with a shriek, portraits are yanked from the wall, and the chandler is pulled from the ceiling with a groan, bringing down great chunks of the ceiling with it. The wreckage piles together, grows, and then disappears in a blink. Nothing is left in it’s wake.

And then it’s over, less than ten seconds eclipsing from start to finish.

Five tries to suck in a breath and then tries again. He grabs onto the shelf behind him to keep himself upright, fighting to breathe the thin, non-existent air. The wood beneath his hand yields and he falls. His knees hit the floor, but it’s far away. The ticking thoughts slow to a sluggish crawl and terror seizes him, squeezing tight until a thought is forced out.

_Paradox._

“Five-” someone wheezes, reaching out to him. They’re a fading wisp of smoke and they’re gone by the time he reaches back, clutching at nothing at all.

The room swings around him, the ground rocking below. His eyes rove the empty room, vision flickering wildly. He snatches at details, but the slip away just as quickly. A spotless, undisturbed room, a portrait of Ben, Reginald Hargreeves standing over him like a ghost from days long past, the words _I told you so_ floating phantom thin and unspoken in the air between them.

_No,_ Five thinks as his body yields to the great, sweeping arm of an altered timeline. Failure wraps around him, burning down the world as he knows it. _**No.**_

The last moment stretches on into infinity as Five tries to reel time back a second, a minute, a half century. He grasps at the ephemeral and it slips between his fingers as it always has, unspooling into a thousand threads all around him. The final moment ends and for Five, for the Umbrella Academy, there isn't a moment after.

-

And then, unexpectedly, there is.

-

The Boy is a genius. He has a certificate stashed away in his junk drawer that says as much though he doesn’t need a one to tell him so. He knows he’s a genius. He also knows he’s right, even if Professor Amser is ready to tear her hair trying to dispute his theories.

Professor Amser works at the university teaching theoretical physics and advanced mathematics to stoned college students. The Boy isn’t her student, but that doesn’t stop him from taking the bus every Wednesday afternoon so he can sit in on her lectures. She lets him, under the guise that he’s been touring the university weekly for the past six months. If asked she’d say she was glad a young man was taking his future so serious. If asked, she’d say he was brilliant and ambitious and tragically pig-headed. She has not been asked, not by staff, and certainly not by any caregivers coming to collector their wandering ward.

She’s right on all accounts, even if she doesn’t know why he’s so certain his theories are correct.

For the Boy, being smart is perhaps the least interesting thing about him. Anyone can be smart- though few actually bother to try. But no one else in the world can do what he can do. It doesn’t have a name, since he’s not one of those Sparrow Academy idiots he’s forced to see on the news every time he wants to check the weather. They flaunt their powers in front of the world, tearing through criminal armies and fantastical villains with the same gusto as comic book superheroes.

The Boy finds the whole thing to be ostentatious. It leaves a bad taste in his mouth, and a strange, squirming feeling in his gut.

~~He wonders if he could have been one of them, if he could have had their lives if things had turned out differently.~~

The Boy knows, with the certainty of one rarely proven wrong, that he can move through time. Space- limited as his jumps are- is simple. It’s boring. But time, ever elusive, ever changing, is a challenge worth his attention. It’s a test of his own capabilities, a chance to prove himself to the only person who’s opinion actually matters: himself. And if he gets to rub his success into Professor Asmer’s face, if he gets the joy of hearing her admit he was correct, all the better.

It’s not a matter of an opportunity presenting itself, but a matter of picking any of his numerous open hours to simply leave the apartment he shares with his foster parents and walk towards the park. The park is a shitstain on the neighborhood, an unofficial battlefield of gang warfare and drug deals gone sour. There’s a cop that hangs around in a parked car in the mornings and afternoons, when children pass by on their way to school. The cop has been there every day for ten years years, though the Boy has only become aware of him in the past few months that he’s lived nearby.

The cop doesn’t do much of anything. He doesn’t enter the park and he doesn’t check out any screams that occasionally happen there in. He’s useless at his job of stopping crime. Yet every day the children make it to school without incidence. They make it home just the same, unaccosted and always accounted for.

On this day, the Boy strolls past the spot where the cop normally sits and throws up a wave that includes less fingers than it should. The cop flashes his lights in warning before resuming his vigilance. The Boy jumps the fence when the cop looks away and strolls across the weed infested grass that’s tall enough to brush his knees. There’s used needles tangled in the weeds and he kicks away an empty bear bottle on his way. The basketballs hoops don’t have nets and all the play equipment is rusted over. The concrete paths are cracked, but he heads that way regardless.

The park is empty and he savors the solitude after endless hours crammed inside a cramped apartment with other children he wants nothing to do with. He finds a long stretch of the path with the fewest cracks and stretches his legs, pacing restlessly. In his head, he runs through the numbers, and then again a second time. The equations are just as flawless as they were the first time and he smiles to himself.

The other part comes as naturally as breathing.

The Boy runs. Space bends and splits around him, swallowing him up and spitting him out the other side. He jumps once, then twice. He leans into it, into that other, intangible thing he can feel snagging at him in the space between here and there. It keeps him grounded. It keeps him trapped. He finds the gap where it’s weakest and he pushes.

The Boy jumps and time slips past him in a wave so heavy it might drown him. He comes out the other side and his last coherent thought is _something has gone wrong._

-

~~The Boy-~~

~~Five-~~

~~The Boy-~~

~~Five-~~

_He_ staggers. He slams into a brick wall and slumps, groaning as his stomach heaves itself up his throat and out. It splatters across his tennis shoes and scattered piles of discarded trash. He holds onto the acid heat in his throat as his ears warble at the sound, at the thud of his wildly beating heart. The world flickers in and out like some cruel and senseless god flipping the light switch repeatedly.

He body leans forward and then keeps going, his bare arm scraping along the bricks the whole way down, leaving skin behind. His hand finds glass and he curls his fists around it. He tries to inhale and finds he can’t.

He’s dying. It’s not a thought, but an existential terror that rears its head and gazes down upon him. He’s failed and this is how he dies.

Blood wells between his fingers, pools beneath his hands. His ears ring with a shrill noise he can’t make sense of. A shadow leans over him and something shines out of the corner of his eye. He starts to look up and then his left arm gives and he collapses face first into the filthy pavement.

-

Five startles awake. He sucks in a breath and holds it, eyes opening wide. Light spills in through a wall of windows, bathing the stark white room in gleaming puddles. Something reeks of burnt sugar and chemicals and it beats around his brain until a memory rises to the surface. It burns, a blinding, throbbing pain building up behind his right eye as the memory makes space for itself.

_Paradox_ , he thinks. _His family._

Five pushes himself halfway upright and reaches for his powers. He grabs at time and space, wrenching it close and winding it tight, reeling it in until it goes taut, straining and splitting beneath his grip. He tries, pushing against the flood, fighting the current like he might reach the source and pull it up by the roots. He only needs a few seconds, a minute at most-

His hold breaks and it crashes over his head.

-

Five startles awake. He sucks in a breath and holds it, eyes opening wide and then snapping shut.

_Paradox. Family._

He reaches for his powers-

-

Five startles awake. He breaths in slowly and clenches his eyes shut as light tries to needle its away into his brain. He presses his hands against his face to keep his brain from leaking out. There’s blood dripping from his nose and the scent of burnt sugar clinging to his skin.

_Paradox. Family._

_Fuck. **Fuck.**_

He doesn’t reach for his powers.


End file.
